Friday, January 20, 2012

Save the Blogosphere

If the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) or the Protect
Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) get passed, or the FBI carries on raiding file
sharing sites as it did with Megaupload.com this morning, blogs like Plunder The
Tombs and thousands of others like it will be TOAST.

If you live in the US
please contact whoever your representative in Congress is and make sure they
know that you do not want this to happen.

4 comments:

Interestingly enough, the author of SOPA has been caught red handed using STOLEN photography works in his official campiegn website [which has since mysteriously gone offline].

What's good for the goose is good for the gander, we should expect SWAT to grab Congressman Lamar Smith and throw him in a cold dark cell in the middle of the night as they confiscate all of his assets [so that they may be later turned over to the photographer, the victim, in this case]. Fair is far, after all. Under existing US law Congressman Smith, the author of SOPA, is clearly guilty of one count of infringement for every person who has "downloaded" his campaign website.

Not that this will ever happen; because in the US corporations get more protections than people do. But one can dream.

Vyldr has posted a useful, if depressing overview on the state of play here: http://desolation-infinite.blogspot.com/2012/01/file-sharing-status.htmlLooks like the file-sharing host Plunder The Tombs now uses (Media Fire) is also about to come under scrutiny. We may need to go back to Rapid Share which is conveniently based in Switzerland. I suppose we shall see...

After what they did to megaupload I would expect everyone who falls under the jurisdiction of the ACTA treaty to stop offering this type of file hosting. It's probably also a matter of time before they set their sights on youtube.

I imagine they will eventually go after Youtube, which really would be the end of Plunder the Tombs since virtually all of our audio content comes from there. However, I doubt they'll actually take Youtube down outright because so many film and music companies (ie: the same ones behind the push to close down file-sharing sites) use it for legitimately promoting their product.

In the meanwhile, anyone who wants to start up a file sharing host in a country not signed up to ACTA stands to make a killing.

A Welcome and Introduction

Plunder the Tombs was started back in 2010 by way of looking back on a musical past that I felt in sore need of curation.

It was a strange and sad time when what passed for “Goth” in clubs seemed a pale imitator of what once was, following first a decade of cookie-cutter Sisters of the Nephilim clone bands and then another decade of industrial dance being palmed off to younger audiences as a type of faux goth. When on rare occasion DJs in “Goth” clubs did finally become brave enough to play something like Bauhaus it was not untypical to have the dance floor clear, and it became obvious that the memory, meaning and legacy of much that had gone before had been lost.

It’s probably safe to say that the boundaries of what was “Goth” were never clearly defined. An absolute blessing for those bands on the original scene before it had a name pinned to the donkey, but an outright curse for those who came later and found rules had been imposed to dictate that which was and that which was not acceptable. Worse still was to come in the 90s from a lazy and unquestioning media who simply assumed that anything that wore black and make up was by definition “Goth”, thus allowing all manner of pretenders licence, and maximising confusion as to what the term actually referred to.

This has gone on for way too long and its time is at an end. Neo Post-Punk bands now proliferate across Europe, old long dead Goth bands rise from their crypts in the UK, and new deathrock bands are breeding like rabbits up the west coast of America. It is time to reclaim our scene back from metal bands and ravers in disguise.

While the Plunder the Tombs of old focused on what had gone before, there are now far too many exciting new things to ignore. We roar back to life in a reboot, covering past , present and things yet to come.

Let us plunder the tombs….

About Me

A DJ throughout the 90s at numerous Goth night clubs in Perth including The Cell, Dominion and others he was probably far too drunk to remember, largely as a result of his preference to work for bar tabs over cash. Also helped found 6RTR fm's Goth & Industrial showcase Darkwings.
More recent projects include the currently dormant Descent - a small night dedicated to playing genuinely good Goth music both old and new in preference to packing the dance floor with songs everyone had heard 20 million times before. He currently runs a monthly show on Behind the Mirror on 6RTR fm which can be heard on Wednesdays at 11pm WST.
Rumour has it he once masterminded an ill-advised Goth fanzine "Small Pleasures" that in retrospect, he remains profoundly grateful never made it off his desk.